''Tropiques'' was a quarterly
literary magazine published in
Martinique
Martinique ( ; or ; Kalinago language, Kalinago: or ) is an island in the Lesser Antilles of the West Indies, in the eastern Caribbean Sea. It was previously known as Iguanacaera which translates to iguana island in Carib language, Kariʼn ...
from 1941 to 1945. It was founded by
Aimé Césaire
Aimé Fernand David Césaire (; ; 26 June 1913 – 17 April 2008) was a French poet, author, and politician from Martinique. He was "one of the founders of the Négritude movement in Francophone literature" and coined the word in French. He ...
,
Suzanne Césaire
Suzanne Césaire (; ; née Roussi; 11 August 1915, Poterie des Trois-Ilets, Martinique – 16 May 1966, Yvelines) was a French writer, teacher, scholar, anti-colonial and feminist activist, and Surrealist. She co-founded the Martinique cultural j ...
, and other Martinican intellectuals of the era, who contributed poetry, essays, and fiction to the magazine. While resisting the Vichy-supported government that ruled Martinique at the time, the writers commented on colonialism, surrealism, and other topics.
André Breton, the French leader of surrealism, contributed to the magazine and helped turn it into a leading voice of surrealism in the Caribbean.
Origins
Aimé Césaire wrote in the first issue of ''Tropiques'' that he had formed the magazine in reaction to the problems of the time and the lack of art coming out of Martinique and other parts of the Caribbean.
Césaire would go on to be the leading contributor to the magazine, and each issue included at least one of his pieces.
He set the focus on the need to create a distinct Martinican culture with the first words of the introduction for the journal's first issue:
"Sterile and silent land. It is of ours that I am speaking."
The first issue was published in
Fort-de-France
Fort-de-France (, , ; ) is a Communes of France, commune and the capital city of Martinique, an overseas department and region of France located in the Caribbean.
History
Before it was ceded to France by Spain in 1635, the area of Fort-de-Fra ...
, Martinique's capital, in April 1941, with contributions by Aimé and Suzanne Césaire,
René Ménil
René Ménil (1907, Gros-Morne, Martinique – 29 August 2004, Sainte-Luce, Martinique) was a French surrealist writer and philosopher who lived on the island of Martinique.
Born and raised on the island of Martinique, Ménil was one of several o ...
,
Charles Péguy
Charles Pierre Péguy (; 7 January 1873 – 5 September 1914) was a French poet, essayist, and editor. His two main philosophies were socialism and nationalism; by 1908 at the latest, after years of uneasy agnosticism, he had become a believing ( ...
, and
Georgette Anderson. It cost 12
francs
The franc is any of various units of currency. One franc is typically divided into 100 centimes. The name is said to derive from the Latin inscription ''francorum rex'' ( King of the Franks) used on early French coins and until the 18th centur ...
for a single issue, or 40 francs for a yearlong
subscription
The subscription business model is a business model in which a customer must pay a recurring price at regular intervals for access to a product or service. The model was pioneered by publishers of books and periodicals in the 17th century. It ...
.
The magazine included poetry, fiction, essays, and commentary from a range of authors in Martinique at the time.
Ménil and the Césaires would write and solicit pieces after their jobs as schoolteachers at the famed Lycée Schoelcher in Fort-de-France.
Negritude
Césaire used his leadership position in the magazine to advance the philosophy of
Negritude. Césaire has been cited by scholars such as Arnold James as one of the most influential theorists of the movement, and he started writing about it in earnest in the years shortly before and during ''Tropiques.''
He wrote that black people, in
Africa
Africa is the world's second-largest and second-most populous continent after Asia. At about 30.3 million km2 (11.7 million square miles) including adjacent islands, it covers 20% of Earth's land area and 6% of its total surfac ...
and the
African diaspora
The African diaspora is the worldwide collection of communities descended from List of ethnic groups of Africa, people from Africa. The term most commonly refers to the descendants of the native West Africa, West and Central Africans who were ...
, should reject the norms that influenced them to try to follow French and other European intellectual traditions.
Scholars have argued that there was not a distinct and significant black Martinican literary tradition before ''Tropiques''.
Frantz Fanon
Frantz Omar Fanon (, ; ; 20 July 1925 – 6 December 1961) was a French West Indian psychiatrist, political philosopher, and Marxist from the French colony of Martinique (today a French department). His works have become influential in the ...
said that Césaire's ideas, especially leaving Europe to create a uniquely African or diasporic African intellectual tradition, had a profound influence on his own later writings.
Like Fanon, Césaire's experiences during the war led him to the belief that
French colonialism
The French colonial empire () comprised the overseas colonies, protectorates, and mandate territories that came under French rule from the 16th century onward. A distinction is generally made between the "First French colonial empire", that ex ...
was associated with many of the same dehumanizing evils as the autocratic regimes spreading across Europe.
After the Free French took over Martinique from the Vichy, Césaire continued to write against European colonialism.
According to Janis L. Pallister, although Césaire wrote against the systems of colonialism that the French had on the island before and during the war, he opposed independence for the French territories in the Caribbean, and he was elected to France's
National Assembly
In politics, a national assembly is either a unicameral legislature, the lower house of a bicameral legislature, or both houses of a bicameral legislature together. In the English language it generally means "an assembly composed of the repr ...
after the war ended.
Part of the Negritude philosophy of the magazine involved a commitment to leftist thought, even though Césaire would personally leave the
French Communist Party
The French Communist Party (, , PCF) is a Communism, communist list of political parties in France, party in France. The PCF is a member of the Party of the European Left, and its Member of the European Parliament, MEPs sit with The Left in the ...
a little more than a decade later over worries that it was not committed to a distinct Martinican or Antillean culture.
Surrealism
Many of the major contributors to ''Tropiques'' were proponents of
surrealist
Surrealism is an art movement, art and cultural movement that developed in Europe in the aftermath of World War I in which artists aimed to allow the unconscious mind to express itself, often resulting in the depiction of illogical or dreamlike s ...
writing, and the magazine was the most prominent example of the movement in the Caribbean at the time.
The various writers in ''Tropiques'' were influenced by surrealism in different ways: whereas Aimé Césaire mostly used it as a poetic device, René Ménil and others adopted its larger philosophical positions in their political writing.
Ménil, who had been exposed to and endorsed surrealism during the early 1930s as a student in Paris, combined a surrealist attitude with Négritude in many of his pieces, including his writing about the need for art in Martinique that comes from distinctly Martinican experiences and traditions.
Ménil wrote that he could avoid reality and establishment theories while using his imagination, as a poet to find a new mode of thought that was still based in the world around him.
Surrealism allowed for such "primitivism," the promotion of art that drew primarily from uniquely African or Caribbean influences, instead of European styles.
In this sense, to allow "Martinique to refocus" and "to lead Martinicans to reflect" on their close environment,
Césaire offers
Henri Stehlé, Director of the Botanical Garden of Fort-de-France, to write two articles for ''Tropiques'' concerning the Martinican flora, and the stories and legends related to the common names of plants used by people (Tropiques N° 2 of 1941 and N° 10 of 1944).
According to Ursula Heise, these articles and "the Caesarean invocations to the Antillean ecology operates as indices of a racial and cultural authenticity which is distinguished from European identity...."
André Breton
André Robert Breton (; ; 19 February 1896 – 28 September 1966) was a French writer and poet, the co-founder, leader, and principal theorist of surrealism. His writings include the first ''Surrealist Manifesto'' (''Manifeste du surréalisme'') ...
, one of the fathers of surrealism in Europe, was living in Martinique during the war, and he was in contact with the writers of ''Tropiques'' after he saw the first issue in a store.
Surrealists in Europe supported ''Tropiques'', in part because Breton heard of Césaire and his magazine in Martinique.
The fact that the magazine was written outside of Europe gave it more authenticity in Breton's eyes. Breton's visit to Martinique had a large influence on the surrealism present in many of the magazine's later issues—the philosophy of ''Tropiques'' was primarily about Negritude and uplifting Martinican culture, and surrealism served as a useful poetic device and theoretical lens for developing these ideas.
Influence of Suzanne Césaire
Scholars such as Kara Rabbitt have stated that unlike many literary trends of the time, women played a leading role in ''Tropiques''. Suzanne Césaire, in particular, was essential to the magazine as an editor and a writer—she wrote seven pieces in the magazine's 14 issues.
Topics included Leo Frobenius, André Breton, and surrealism.
She would almost never write again (just one play was published before her death in 1966). One prominent novelist,
Maryse Condé
Maryse Condé (née Marise Liliane Appoline Boucolon; 11 February 1934 – 2 April 2024) was a French novelist, critic, and playwright from the French Overseas department and region of Guadeloupe. She was also an academic, whose teaching car ...
, named Suzanne Césaire as the most important influence behind the political ideologies of the magazine.
Suzanne Césaire was the first of the writers in her circle (even before her husband) to challenge communism and Breton's surrealism as too grounded in European ideals and not being committed enough to an independent Antillean culture and intellectual tradition.
In her final essay in ''Tropiques'', "Le Grand Camouflage," Suzanne Césaire wrote about the changes that the West Indies had caused on the French sense of nationhood and identity, a reversal of the usual view of colonialism as just being one country imposing its values on another.
She concluded that the white French majority was unwilling to see these changes: "They dare not recognize themselves in this ambiguous being, the West Indian man ... They did not expect this strange budding of their blood."
Resistance to Vichy government
Martinique was controlled by France's Nazi-affiliated
Vichy
Vichy (, ; ) is a city in the central French department of Allier. Located on the Allier river, it is a major spa and resort town and during World War II was the capital of Vichy France. As of 2021, Vichy has a population of 25,789.
Known f ...
government until mid-1943, and the island authorities attempted to shut down the magazine soon before Martinique was taken by the
Free French
Free France () was a resistance government
claiming to be the legitimate government of France following the dissolution of the Third French Republic, Third Republic during World War II. Led by General , Free France was established as a gover ...
.
Lieutenant de vaisseau Bayle, the Chief of Information Services for the island's government, wrote that ''Tropiques'' was no longer eligible to get paper to print on (paper was in short supply during the war, so it was being rationed, and denying a periodical its paper supply could effectively silence it). Bayle wrote that he had "very formal objections to a revolutionary, radical, and sectarian review," so ''Tropiques'' could not publish a new issue.
Aimé Césaire, Suzanne Césaire,
Georges Gratiant
Georges Gratiant, (6 January, 1907-20 June, 1992) was a lawyer and politician from Martinique. He was mayor of Le Lamentin from 1959 to 1989 and president of the General Council from 1946 to 1947.
Biography
Youth and early activism
Geo ...
, Aristide Maugée,
René Ménil
René Ménil (1907, Gros-Morne, Martinique – 29 August 2004, Sainte-Luce, Martinique) was a French surrealist writer and philosopher who lived on the island of Martinique.
Born and raised on the island of Martinique, Ménil was one of several o ...
, and Lucie Thésée signed the response, in which they denounced the Vichy government's racism and noted great French writers who had claimed the negative qualities Bayle had tagged them with:
''"Racists,"'' yes. Racism like that of Toussaint-Louverture, Claude McKay, and Langston Hughes—against the racism like that of Drumont and Hitler.
''Tropiques'' was unable to publish until the Free French came to power in Martinique a few months later. The next publication was a double issue, to make up for the issue that was censored.
René Ménil later wrote that even when the Vichy government allowed ''Tropiques'' to be published, the authors had to censor themselves.
Informed readers, many of whom were in the same Martinican literary circles as the writers, knew to go beyond what the articles and essays directly said in interpreting the political messages. The creation of the magazine, by a group of intellectuals after the Vichy-affiliated regime took power and started to suppress freedoms, was itself seen as a protest by some.
At times, though, the opposition to the Vichy-affiliated government came to the surface. In an example of this, Dominique Berthet cited that Breton wrote in honor of Jules Monnerot, an early leader in Martinique's communist movement, shortly after Monnerot's death,
and he wrote that "in truth a man is only great for the greatness of what he refuses."
References
{{Authority control
Caribbean literature
Defunct literary magazines published in France
French-language magazines
Magazines established in 1941
Magazines disestablished in 1945
Quarterly magazines published in France
Surrealist magazines
Works by Aimé Césaire